Life is grand

Jellyfish Portal

Originally uploaded by Automatt.

Newzie has a fascinating and well implemented colour system that denotes the last update time/date of a feed. The colouring is a bit bold for my tastes but the idea is sound and I found it worked well.

Newzie itself is one of the better desktop aggregators out there.

I’ve spent the past hour or so with a co-worker trying to get a Cocoon+Java+RSS+MySQL+XSL+DELI system to do the simplest of tasks. What a nightmare. It is incredible in its flexiblitlity. I can’t think of much it can’t do. But what it does do is very little. It seems as though the chaps who built this system spent 90% of their time on the framework of the application and about 5% on the application itself. It has huge potential but all the bits that actually do things aren’t there. String replace? Nope. I had to find an XSL template that someone else had rewritten to get that.

It’s the autobahn without the Porsche. The scaffolding without the building. The bricks without the builder.

It’s cool and wonderful and so much fun to work with but ultimately it is insanity when all you want is to get the job done. The glass without the beer (thanks for that one, Elaine.)

This is where Ruby on Rails is kicking Java and .NET web-frameworks all over the park. They are visionary and capable of far more than Rails. But Rails actually does common tasks that you need to do. It is less flexible but ultimately more productive.

For those few edge cases that it can’t handle I’ll write a function in something else and pipe it in.

Sink

Originally uploaded by -Birdy-.

evhead makes some good points about how pageviews are going the way of hits in the grand game of website analytics:

Pageviews were never a great measure of popularity…

So what’s a better measurement? Good question. Like many good questions, the answer is “it depends.” If you’re talking about what’s important to pay attention to on your own site, you have to determine what your primary success criteria are and measure that as best you can. For some sites, that could be subscribers, or paying users, or revenue, or widgets deployed, or files uploaded, or what have you. It may even be pageviews.

At Blogger, we determined that our most critical metric was number of posts. An increase in posts meant that people were not just creating blogs, but updating them, and more posts would drive more readership, which would drive more users, which would drive more posts.

Essentially it depends on your site and your intentions. A search site has very different measures of success to a site such as MySpace or Flickr or a web-app like Megite.

evhead goes on to say that someone should tackle the tough job of providing a single metric culled from various data. I doubt one metric can be found and doubt it is even worth it. The measure of success between different vertical markets is too great for one metric to be anything more than vainglory. It is largely worthless knowing that MySpace is on the march to beating Yahoo! in pageviews/traffic/something. Two different sites.

Looking above you can see my latest Google Analytics report. It is pretty and has some interesting data points but the interest is the same as a funny video on YouTube. Interesting but useless.

Google Anlytics isn’t useless. For many sites it is a power tool but in my case and the case of many personal bloggers it is pretty pictures and nothing more. My measure of success is connections with readers. Readers who email me, readers who comment and readers who mention my posts in theirs. Not pageviews or sources, not search keywords or length of time spent.

A metric per vertical market would be useful, for advertisers and investors and even us users, but one, grand, over-engineered metric isn’t worth our time.

expect any weather

Originally uploaded by hkvam.

Check out the mapping features for Flickr. Very cool. Above you can see a broad view of Europe with clusters of photos (the more you zoom in the more it shows, clever feature.)

And here you can see me dragging photos onto the map which will then tag my photos with their location. Dead easy and very slick.

My only concern is that I won’t keep it up. Everytime I add a photo will I got to the bother of going into the Organizer and dragging photos onto maps? Maybe when I upload new photos there can just be a simple drop-down listing previously located areas for my photos.

Still, good job Flickr and Yahoo!

Ruby really is more productive. I wanted to add OPML support to a project of ours and from past .NET experience with this wasn’t looking all that forward to it. But rexml and rio came to the rescue.

Here is some sample Ruby code that extracts all the URLs from an OPML file:

opml_file = ''
rio('http://share.opml.org/opml/top100.opml') > opml_file
opml_doc = Document.new(opml_file)
urls = XPath.match(opml_doc, '//@xmlUrl')

That is it. rio does the hard work of saving the web-stored OPML file into a string. rexml does the hard job of parsing that string into an XML document and then we use XPath to find all of the xmlUrl attributes.

rexml comes with most standard Ruby installs and you can install rio with gem install rio. The rio documentation is here.

Sometimes it takes a concrete example to show the true potential of an idea. Dapper is just such an idea. When it was first launched I thought it was clever but as a glorified screen-scraper I did not see much use for it.

Then I found an example that made Dapper shine.

Luminous Landscape is by far and away the best photography site on the net. I’ll take its opinion over any other photographic review site without question. They are not first with news, rumour or conjecture and only deal with truly interesting photographic news (in other words they don’t report on every single new digicam released of which there are a handful each day.)

Unfortunately LL doesn’t have an RSS feed so keeping up to date is a weekly affair of visiting the website (so Web 1.0.)

Enter Dapper. I just used it to create a Luminous Landscape RSS feed, scrapping the LL data off the front-page and pumping out a working feed. Fantastic. The process was easy once I figured out you need to group your fields for the RSS output to work.

Well done Dapper. A useful service implemented in a usable UI.

Stack ‘em Up

Originally uploaded by Dale (Ling Gondaeng).